What do the terms “big-endian” and “little-endian” mean?
Memory is addressed in units of bytes (8 bits) physically, but is logically organized into bigger chunks — half-words (16 bits), words (32 bits) and double-words (64 bits). “Big-endian” and “little-endian” refers to two different ways of logically interpreting the bytes within a word. In little-endian machines, the lowest address byte is the least significant byte of the word. In big-endian machines, the lowest address byte is the most significant byte of the word.Examples: Machines with little endian byte order: DEC VAX, DEC RISC, Intel 80×86 Machines with big endian byte order: IBM 360, MIPS, Motorola, SPARCThe byte order doesn’t make much difference within the same machine (unless an application accesses the same location both as a byte and a word). However, byte ordering can be a problem when exchanging data across machines with different byte orderings, and applications have to take care to do the proper conversion, if necessary.
